kstars <-> orbfit (<-> astrometrica) ?

[Steffen Möller]

Hi Jasem,

On 14.11.17 06:49, Jasem Mutlaq wrote:
> Hi Steffen,
>
> I just read on OrbFit and it is a very interesting project. However,
> I'm not sure how it fits with KStars? Maybe one scenario is to reduce
> captured images from Ekos for comet/asteroid discovery and pass them
> to OrbFit?

The complete workflow is likely outside the scope of KStars, and I admit
to have only _mentally_ prepared myself for this once I retire, but from
what I gathered it would be

a) you take a series of images with Kstars/Ekos of some location

b) at some leisure time later you investigate this series with
Astrometrica to identify candidate asteroids, but you do not submit to
the MPC because you need a confirmation from a second night

c) the first series was a couple of days ago (clouds or real life
prevented earlier observations) and you wonder about the asteroid's
whereabouts.

How should one find that new location of the earlier observed asteroid?
Am I supposed to linearly extrapolate from the earlier night by drawing
a line on the sky map? If I get this right, then orbfit (or some other
tool yet unknown to me) would provide that information. It must be
something that the MPC runs itself internally when it reaches out to the
public for confirmations. So, if this is found useful, one could
similarly allow Kstars to interpret a preliminary MPC submission as an
input to its observation planner. It would then run orbfit on this
information and by some magic decide about the number and location of
images to be taken.

> I'm not sure if this is applicable. The problems with the positions
> calculations you referred to in the email is largely solved now.

Nice.

Regards,

Steffen


>
> On Sun, Nov 12, 2017 at 6:48 PM, Steffen Möller
> <steffen_moeller at gmx.de <mailto:steffen_moeller at gmx.de>> wrote:
>
>     Hello,
>
>     I wished to have a bit more time to follow my interest in
>     astronomy. So,
>     I thought I should at least follow the music of this mailing list. You
>     may have some interest in me as a Debian Developer, just ping me if
>     there is something I should address.
>
>     Something I came up with myself is the Linux tool OrbFit
>     (http://adams.dm.unipi.it/orbfit/
>     <http://adams.dm.unipi.it/orbfit/>). After a bit of a peek in this
>     mailing list's archive I found
>     https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kstars-devel/2017-September/006649.html
>     <https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kstars-devel/2017-September/006649.html>
>     which suggests to access a public service for known solar objects. Is
>     there a workflow in kstars to also allow predictions for the orbits of
>     yet unknown solar objects? If I get this right then this would be more
>     of a challenge for asteroid-hunting Astrometrica
>     (http://www.astrometrica.at/) on Windows, i.e. with Wine on Linux
>     (works!).
>
>     I happily offer to package OrbFit for Debian/Ubuntu/... if that helps
>     preparing any such development.
>
>     Best regards,
>
>     Steffen <moeller at debian.org <http://debian.org>>
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Best Regards,
> Jasem Mutlaq
>